An explosion has hit the offices of an English-language newspaper in central Baghdad and casualties are feared, witnesses say.

Ambulances rushed to the scene, not far from Baghdad's national theatre and hotels housing foreign contractors.

It was not clear whether it was a mortar or car bomb that caused Wednesday's explosion. The house was engulfed by flames soon afterwards.

The Baghdad Mirror, edited by Iraqis, is Baghdad's only English-language weekly.

I'd never heard of the Baghdad Mirror before. Two previous attempts at an English-language publication in Iraq failed (the Baghdad Bulletin and Iraq Today), this might have been another one. I wonder if it is the first time that journalists' offices are specifically targeted for bombing by the Iraqi insurgency.

Issandr El Amrani is a Cairo-based writer and consultant. His reporting and commentary on the Middle East and North Africa has appeared in The Economist, London Review of Books, Financial Times, The National, The Guardian, Time and other publications. He also publishes one of the longest-running blog in the region, www.arabist.net.